November 20, 2006

With the submission of the consultants’ report last week and this week’s Town Hall meetings with Jeff, the Transformation Team is winding down.

In the coming weeks, Jeff and the AULs will be reviewing the consultant’s report and work of the team in more detail. This review process will guide our progress toward a 21st century library that is more integrated with the research, teaching, and learning needs of McMaster and the broader community.

We would like to thank all those who participated in the interviews and focus groups, as well as those who shared their thoughts with us more informally. We look forward to working with all of you as the Library’s transformation progresses!

“Successful organizational change can be linked to four key components:

leadership and employee commitment

stakeholder commitment

financial and time resources

excellent project execution.

The recommendations in this report reflect these key components. The Library should focus on the implementation of these recommendations within an integrated change management approach.The recommended change process for the McMaster Library can be summarized by three “p”s – pace, partnerships and pilots. The pace of change (i.e. how quickly changes are implemented) for different initiatives needs to consider the priorities of stakeholders (with some taking place quickly and others more slowly). A focus on partnerships will ensure that future changes strengthen these relationships to keep the Library relevant to the university community. Pilot refers to the use of pilot projects for new initiatives, which help to minimize risk and, when successful, support the change process.”

All library staff are invited to a Town Hall session with Jeff Trzeciak to review the
report’s recommendations, and to discuss process and general timelines for moving forward. The sessions will be held:

September 28, 2006

Consultants Peter Hausdorf and Karen Boa have been hired to work with the Transformation Team. They were selected because of their work in strategic human resources, and because Peter (the Lead Consultant) has a connection with McMaster. He received his PhD from the School of Business in Business Administration specializing in Human Resources Management and Industrial Relations

The consultants will:

provide advice to the Team on how to move through this process of organizational change

solicit input from library staff and users through a website (stay tuned) which they will pass on to the Team

interview approximately 20 key members of the McMaster University community

hold approximately 4 employee focus groups

work with the Transformation Team to submit a report to the University Librarian

September 14, 2006

The Transformation Team invited Mike Ridley from the University of Guelph to join our transformation conversation today. We had seventy-two people turn out to hear his provocative talk. I wish we had podcast it, but we digital immigrants on the Transformation Team didn’t think of it! However, his slides are available, and the library owns the two books he recommended:

September 11, 2006

The latest issue (August 2006) of American Libraries, the monthly newsletter of the American Library Association, includes a message from new ALA President Leslie Burger.

With an eye to both libraries and the communities they support, Berger will be focusing on transformation during her year-long term as President. In her message, Berger recognizes that, “librarians and libraries have already been through a decade of great change spurred by a technological revolution that has altered the way we do business.” As a result, “we are hard at work making over our reference services, catalogs, approaches to customer service, buildings, and collections.”

But according to Burger, we’re not finished. “Now,” she says, “we must change how others see us. We have this absolutely unique moment in time to transform the way in which the world perceives us, to build on the things that we do so well, and to set the stage for the next century of library service to communities we serve.”

She concludes, “Change isn’t easy, but it is the key to our future.” I think she’s right. Libraries of all types, sizes, and locations are working to find their role in the evolving needs of their communities. As we work through our own process of transformation, it’s good to remember that we’re not in it alone.

September 7, 2006

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted part 1. In that post, I touched on some of the common themes emerging from my readings of various papers on the future of catalogues and cataloguing.

As I mentioned there, I think we need to give serious thought to these common strategies. In particular, I think we need to put greater emphasis on describing our unique resources, whether that’s Research Collections; theses, SEDAP, and other products of McMaster scholarship; or collections of research and teaching resources held by the Faculties and other parts of the University community.

There are a number of other ideas that have turned up in my reading. Here are a few:

Consider description an ongoing process

Change the workflow from the traditional process of acquire–catalogue–put on shelf to acquire–put on shelf with existing description–begin ongoing enhancement of description using “iterative automated query of metadata sources” (California, 25).

I’m not sure how we do this one. Perhaps some of our e-resources have online sources of description that we could tap into for updates.

Abandon LCSH and MeSH

Some authors suggest that we rely more on subject keywords rather than authority controlled subject headings. Other proposals in this area call for “encourag[ing] research and development into automatic subject analysis” and consideration of “whether automated enriched metadata such as TOC [tables of contents], indexes can become surrogates for subject headings and classification for retrieval” (Calhoun, 18; California, 24).

Many library-folk have problems with this. For my part, I see subject analysis as one of the big “value-added” aspects of cataloguing. It gives our users the ability to pull together resources in a variety of languages and formats in a single result set.

Concerns have also been raised about losing the “I know it when I see it” aspect of access and retrieval. Keyword searching gives results containing terms specified by the user. It doesn’t, except by chance, provide relevant items containing other terms the user hasn’t thought of.

Watching the Endeca search engine demo a while back and looking at North Carolina State University’s use of it with their catalogue, I see possibilities for LCSH and MeSH to be more useful. Try a keyword search in the NCSU catalogue and look at the results page. Click around on some of the links. Share your thoughts!

For physical resources there’s also the “mark and park” problem–they still have to go somewhere on the shelf. How do we determine the appropriate classification (i.e. shelving location) without doing subject analysis? Are there other ways to locate physical resources that would better serve our users?

Replace local catalogues with shared catalogues

Rather than each library purchasing and maintaining a system like Horizon and constructing its own catalogue, some are advocating a union catalogue approach.

Could we contract with OCLC to provide a customized view of FirstSearch for our public searching and catalogue directly in OCLC?

Could the members of OCUL (the Ontario Council of University Libraries) share a single catalogue and give our users the choice of searching one library, all of them, or some combination of their choosing? Getting all of the players to agree on something like this would be the first challenge, but it could have interesting results.

Radical Solutions

Those familiar with the current cataloguing environment will recognize these ideas as more fundamental changes to our existing practice than those discussed in Part 1. Support for these ideas has been less widespread, but they are provoking lots of discussion. And discussion is what it’s about right now. Should we be looking at a more fundamental change to our practices? What other outside-the-box solutions are available to us? And how do we get there from here?

August 24, 2006

I’ve been reading through various documents on directions that cataloguing and description might take. Some of the reports are listed here.

The full reports are well worth reading. If pressed for time (and who isn’t?), the executive summary of the University of California report and Karen Calhoun’s “Blueprint for Phased Implementation” (p. 16) are useful as quick summaries of their recommendations.

So what are they saying? Well, many of the reports propose the following strategies:

Streamline cataloguing

Accept more cataloguing copy with less review and fewer local modifications. Consider using vendor records for foreign-language materials and other types of resources that would be difficult to handle.

Focus on what’s important

Consider which elements of description are the most important for access and focus in-house editing and verification on those elements.

Focus on unique resources

Put more emphasis on describing rare and unique materials, such as archives and rare books, resources developed locally, and sources for teaching and research found elsewhere on campus and in the community. Digitize more of what makes us unique to promote use of our collections.

Use other forms of description

Select the most appropriate type of description for the resource.

For books, this may be MARC and AACR2 (or RDA in a couple of years)–or it may be something else.

For digital resources, apply other types of description. We might use Dublin Core for some of our digital projects. For artwork or photographs (both digital and physical), we might look at the Visual Resource Association’s VRA Core framework. And there are others that we could use for different types of resources.

Broaden the search

Provide users with a single interface that will search the catalogue, digital library collections, and other information resources simultaneously. Search results should give users richer content, such as cover art, tables of contents, and reviews.

These strategies have appeared as common themes among the reports and proposals. Stay tuned for my next post for some of the others.

My own feeling is that there are proposals here we need to evaluate, but I want to hear what you think! Are there ideas here that we could build on? Better yet, what’s not on this list? How do we best serve our users in our digital, on-demand world?

August 18, 2006

Many of us participated in an “Embracing Change” workshop earlier this summer and recognize that change involves a lot of uncertainty. Since the Transformation Team was established many colleagues have asked me – ‘what exactly will this change look like?’ or ‘what exactly am I supposed to embrace?’ My answer: we don’t know. yet.

For me, embracing change means looking forward with a deliberately positive approach. It also means: taking individual responsibility while working collegially, and being well informed about a multitude of issues (libraries, learning, higher education….). Personally I found the Taiga Forum (March 2006) Provocative Statements to be an interesting snapshot of the possible future of academic libraries. Some excerpts:

Within the next FIVE YEARS:

traditional library organizational structures will no longer be functional.

libraries will have reduced the physical footprint of the physical collection within the library proper by at least 50 percent.

the majority of reference questions will be answered through Google Answer or something like it. There will no longer be reference desks or reference offices in the library. Instead, public services staff offices will be located outside the physical library. Metasearching will render reference librarians obsolete.

a large number of libraries will no longer have local OPACs.

academic computing and libraries will have merged. The library will be a partner in the Learning and Research Support Services Infrastructure.

there will be no more librarians as we know them. Staff may have MBAs or be computer/data scientists. All library staff will need the technical skills equivalent to today’s systems and web services personnel.

August 15, 2006

Libraries today are at the heart of unprecedented change.This change is fueled primarily by new technologies, new resources and new services that were unimaginable as recently as three years ago.Never before have the challenges we face been so exciting or the opportunities so great.

Increasingly our organizations are being called upon to do more; do it more effectively and more efficiently; and do it in a way that distinguishes us from our competitors.Successful organizations will be measured, in part, by our ability to adapt quickly to the changing needs and expectations of our users.Adaptation will require a culture of risk-taking and innovation that encourages and rewards the radical rethinking of library resources and servicesThe McMasterUniversity community is recognized for its ability to lead by reinterpreting/reinventing itself each generation based on long-standing traditions of creative thinking & innovation.The recent hiring of a new University Librarian coupled with several librarian vacancies provides us with an opportunity to make some significant organizational changes to meet the needs of the 21st century academic library user.